Police Shooting Fatalities in the United States

Neha Gyawali

4/26/2022

Introduction

Unnecessary violence employed by many police officers throughout the US is an issue that needs to be addressed and dealt with. Recently, police fatalities have been highlighted in the media for their often unjust natures. Black men especially seem to be more targeted than the rest of the population. Let’s take a look at police fatalities data that has been gathered by the Washington Post starting from 2015 to now to help us understand what demographic is at risk. We will take a look at the top 25 most fatal cities and break down the fatalities by race. We will also compare the race breakdown of the fatalities to the race breakdown of the population of the cities. For this we will use census data obtained from https://www.statsamerica.org/town/ that gives us demographic data for US cities.

Package Installation

## -- Attaching packages --------------------------------------- tidyverse 1.3.1 --
## v ggplot2 3.3.5     v purrr   0.3.4
## v tibble  3.1.6     v dplyr   1.0.7
## v tidyr   1.1.4     v stringr 1.4.0
## v readr   2.1.1     v forcats 0.5.1
## -- Conflicts ------------------------------------------ tidyverse_conflicts() --
## x dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
## x dplyr::lag()    masks stats::lag()
## Rows: 7246 Columns: 17
## -- Column specification --------------------------------------------------------
## Delimiter: ","
## chr (10): name, date, manner_of_death, armed, gender, race, city, state, thr...
## dbl  (4): id, age, longitude, latitude
## lgl  (3): signs_of_mental_illness, body_camera, is_geocoding_exact
## 
## i Use `spec()` to retrieve the full column specification for this data.
## i Specify the column types or set `show_col_types = FALSE` to quiet this message.
## New names:
## * `` -> ...9
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## -- Column specification --------------------------------------------------------
## Delimiter: ","
## chr (1): City
## dbl (1): Other
## lgl (1): ...9
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## i Use `spec()` to retrieve the full column specification for this data.
## i Specify the column types or set `show_col_types = FALSE` to quiet this message.

Gender Breakdown

 Here we can see the difference in the number of female versus male fatalities. This helps us understand the demographic that is in danger of being killed by a police officer.    When looking at this breakdown, we can tell that males are much more likely to die from a police fatality than women.

Race Breakdown Throughout the United States

## # A tibble: 7 x 2
##   race            count
##   <chr>           <int>
## 1 Asian             105
## 2 Black            1593
## 3 Hispanic         1088
## 4 Native American    91
## 5 Other              47
## 6 White            3022
## 7 <NA>             1300

 These race breakdown charts show that the race breakdown of police fatalities are not proportional to the race breakdown of the United States as a whole. White people make up 60% of the population while they are only 20% of the fatalities. While Black people make up 13.4% of the population and are 21.9% of all fatalities. Hispanic people are

Police Fatalities

Some text about this table and how interesting the results are!

## Warning in showSRID(uprojargs, format = "PROJ", multiline = "NO", prefer_proj =
## prefer_proj): Discarded datum unknown in Proj4 definition
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Race Breakdown of Police Fatalities in the top 25 Most Fatal Cities

 Using these graphs we can see the top 25 cities with the most police fatalities. The first graph shows us the race breakdown in numbers and the second one shows us the race breakdown in percentage. We can see that in cities such as Chicago, Columbus, New York City, St.Louis, Atlanta, Louisville, and Philadelphia, Black people make up more than 50% of fatalities. Lets now look at the population breakdown of these cities to see they are proportional.

## # A tibble: 7,246 x 18
## # Groups:   date [2,471]
##       id name    date       manner_of_death armed   age gender race  city  state
##    <dbl> <chr>   <date>     <chr>           <chr> <dbl> <chr>  <chr> <chr> <chr>
##  1     3 Tim El~ 2015-01-02 shot            gun      53 M      Asian Shel~ WA   
##  2     4 Lewis ~ 2015-01-02 shot            gun      47 M      White Aloha OR   
##  3     5 John P~ 2015-01-03 shot and Taser~ unar~    23 M      Hisp~ Wich~ KS   
##  4     8 Matthe~ 2015-01-04 shot            toy ~    32 M      White San ~ CA   
##  5     9 Michae~ 2015-01-04 shot            nail~    39 M      Hisp~ Evans CO   
##  6    11 Kennet~ 2015-01-04 shot            gun      18 M      White Guth~ OK   
##  7    13 Kennet~ 2015-01-05 shot            gun      22 M      Hisp~ Chan~ AZ   
##  8    15 Brock ~ 2015-01-06 shot            gun      35 M      White Assa~ KS   
##  9    16 Autumn~ 2015-01-06 shot            unar~    34 F      White Burl~ IA   
## 10    17 Leslie~ 2015-01-06 shot            toy ~    47 M      Black Knox~ PA   
## # ... with 7,236 more rows, and 8 more variables:
## #   signs_of_mental_illness <lgl>, threat_level <chr>, flee <chr>,
## #   body_camera <lgl>, longitude <dbl>, latitude <dbl>,
## #   is_geocoding_exact <lgl>, count <int>